Armstong Whitworth Pyramid and new launch vehicle

[pmn1]

In Volume 59 Supplement 2, 2006 of BIS’s Space Chronicles – UK Spaceplanes, there is a short article on the late 50’s Armstrong Whitworth Pyramid manned vehicle and a new launcher for it with a launch mass of 160 tonnes and a diameter of 3.96m and a first stage length of 12.5m (nothing quoted for second or third stages)<br /><br />Pyramid was expected to weigh about 1,879kg (though the article suggests this is low) and have a length of 25ft 3â€, a span of 29ft 6â€, a height of 9ft 3†and a plan area of 3658 sq ft with the crew in a cylindrical structure at the rear.<br /><br />Does anyone have any information on Pyramid and the new launcher.<br /><br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[gunsandrockets]

What an interesting bit of spaceflight history trivia you have brought forth!<br /><br />This is all I could find...<br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />The 1950's<br /><br />The waverider design was evolved from work done in the U.K. in the 1950's and early 1960's on winged atmosphere re-entry vehicles. Terence Nonweiler had first published work on the waverider concept in 1951, when he suggested the use of a waveriding wing shape for atmospheric re-entry vehicles. By the late 1950`s, Nonweiler, then at Queen`s University, Belfast, was working on the mathematics concerning basic 'wedge' flow for a manned re-entry vehicle developed by Armstrong-Whitworth Aircraft Ltd, to be launched off the nose of the British Blue Streak rocket (sadly cancelled). <br /><br />To ease his calculations, he started by assuming a 2-D flow as seen from the side, i.e. no spillage. Nonweiler, while lamenting the fact that in 3-D, the underside flow would spill over the sides, causing cross-wise components of flow complicating his calculations, and causing loss of lift, decided to find a way of preventing the spillage. <br /><br />He did this in order to keep his 3-D equations essentially 2-D, but realised that real hypersonic vehicles could utilise this principle, known as (shock) Wave-riding to improve their lifting performance. <br /><br />The work done at Armstrong-Whitworth Aircraft Ltd between 1957 and 1959 produced a pyramid shaped design with a flat underside and short wings. This design sought to reduce the total heating experienced by the vehicle on entering the Earth's atmosphere by means of low wing loading (also later adopted in the Waverider design), and by conducting the heat generated on the underside of the vehicle up, through the hot skin and outer fuselage structure, and dumping it off the cooler topside into the wake behind the vehicle, rather than allowing heat to sink into a heat shield enveloping the vehicle itself. <br /><br />Th

 

[pmn1]

Got some replies and images from the Secret Projects board<br /><br />http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2946.msg23725#new <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[gunsandrockets]

Huh. That's interesting. It reminds me of the ASSET test vehicle.